Vizio VF550XVT LCD HDTV Review - Power Consumption

Power Consumption (7.44)
Once you've paid for your television your expenses don't end. Every television uses a lot of power, in the case of the Vizio VF550XVT power costs will be $51.29 every year. That's for a typical family at the average cost of power with the television calibrated to our settings as explained in the calibration section with the exception that the backlight has been turned down to 70 instead of 100. We do this last because we want every television we test in this section to have a brightness of 200 candelas per meter squared (cd/m2), which allows us to compared power costs across televisions. 200 cd/m2 is a good brightness for almost all situations. We also look at the power expenditure with the backlight turned up to maximum and the backlight turned down to minimum, you can see all our results in the table below.

The Vizio VF550XVT's power draw using our calibrated settings at 200 cd/m2 is not the best we've seen, not surprising for a 55-inch television. Still, it's better than what we've seen from some Plasma televisions, which tend to use a lot more power than LCD televisions.